Overdose deaths are now the leading cause of death among young Americans – killing more in a year than were ever killed annually by HIV, gun violence or car crashes.
Preliminary CDC data published by the New York Times shows US drug overdose deaths surged 19 percent to at least 59,000 in 2016.
That means that for the first time drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under 50 years old.
The data, published in a special report by the Times’ Josh Katz, lays bare the bleak state of America’s opioid addiction crisis fueled by deadly manufactured drugs like fentanyl.
The figures are based on preliminary data, which will form part of an official report by the CDC later this year.
Experts warn a key factor of the surge in deaths is fentanyl, which can be 50 times more powerful than heroin.
The Times said its data showed between 59,000 and 65,000 people could have died from overdoses in 2016, up from 52,404 in 2015, and double the death rate a decade ago.
‘And all evidence suggests the problem has continued to worsen in 2017,’ the Times said.
On Tuesday the US Drug Enforcement Administration issued a stark warning to officers over handling fentanyl, which drug traffickers use as a cheap way to strengthen the effect of heroin and prescription opioids.
It pointed to several cases in which police officers experienced extreme reactions after inadvertently touching or inhaling fentanyl-spiked drugs.
The officers needed strong and sometime multiple injections of anti-overdose drugs like Narcan to prevent death.
‘The spread of fentanyl means that any encounter a law enforcement officer has with an unidentified white powder could be fatal,’ said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at a DEA event.
‘Just two milligrams – the equivalent of a few grains of table salt, an amount that can fit on the tip of your finger – can be lethal,’ Rosenstein said.
The DEA has also warned officers against letting drug-sniffing dogs too close to anything that might contain fentanyl.
Overdoses of opioids, including prescription drugs and heroin, killed more than 33,000 people in the United States in 2015 – the latest year for which data are available. That was more than any year on record.
Of the total deaths in 2015, nearly 13,000 were caused by heroin overdoses.
Eighty percent of people addicted to heroin started by using prescription drugs.
West Virginia has by far the highest rate of death from opioid overdoses in the country: 41.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 2015, a jump of nearly 17 from the prior year.
New Hampshire trailed West Virginia with 34.3 deaths per 100,000 population, but saw the biggest increase from the prior year, when the rate was 26.2.
America’s most populous state, California had the largest total number of overdose deaths at 4,659 in 2015, followed by Ohio with 3,310, which like West Virginia has been hard hit by the epidemic.
Of the total deaths from opioids, more than 7,000 were people over the age of 45, including 700 over the age of 65, and 800 under the age of 25.
Nearly 11,000 of those who died of overdoses were white, non-Hispanic.
The death rate from synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, surged 72 percent in 2015, and heroin death rates increased almost 21 percent.
Since 1999, sales of prescription opioids in the United States have quadrupled.
Drug companies over six years shipped 780 million prescription pain pills to West Virginia, a state of less than two million, half of those came from the three largest US drug companies: McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen.
About 1 in 10 babies born in Huntington, West Virginia’s main hospital are born addicted to opioids – suffering from Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) – 13 times the national rate.
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